On Moving Forward
“What made the languor worse was that I was stuck. Without the criminal charges, I could have just taken a few plays off, picked up the pieces, and then bounced back and gotten busy on a new idea. Passion and drive give you a reason to get up in the morning. Now, I had nothing. It felt like there was no way for me to move forward.”
What does it mean to move forward?
This is a question you spend no time thinking about when you are going through life on autopilot, a mindless passenger on the conveyor belt. It is only when affairs come to a screeching halt that you stop and reflect. Are there answers, or is this just another one of those Q’s with no A’s?
Let us explore.
For most people, they would measure moving forward by money. If the year ends and your wealth increased, you moved forward. But anyone who has ever started a business knows this isn’t the case. Your wealth not only decreases as you make up-front investments, but you will also likely earn nothing or make losses for the first few years. Are you steadily moving backwards? If you’re committed to a life sentence in the W-2 wage cage you may say yes, the rest of us would argue otherwise. Now, what about if you were to donate 90% of your wealth to charity? Did you move backwards? If yes, your barometer is broken. Money comes and goes so fast that if you tie your self-worth to your net worth you’re going to make yourself miserable. And please don’t even mention titles or promotions, which are the easiest way to manipulate an employee into thinking they gained something without having to pay them a single extra penny. Point being, only people destined for a lifetime of indentured corporate servitude have been brainwashed into thinking that this stuff constitutes progress, because none of it is not a good gauge for whether you are moving forward in life.
Others would say children. This feels like the correct answer except for a different question, like what gives your life meaning, purpose and fulfillment, or maybe why are we here. Your life doesn’t end when you have children, although it certainly feels like I know a lot of men who completely threw in the towel and gave up on accomplishing anything in life as soon as they had kids. You’ve still got a lot of years left on this earth yourself, homeboy. Don’t rest on your laurels. I would just like to point out that if having a child constitutes moving forward, every single guy I met in prison had somewhere between ten and twenty kids. Humanity isn’t going anywhere. Dudes are reproducing. And by this barometer, they are moving forward faster than all y’all. This is probably where you say well, my kids are better than theirs, which may be right, it may be wrong, but no matter what, it’s an arrogant statement on your end, and that energy you’re putting out into the universe will come back around to you. That’s neither here nor there, so let’s get back to the matter at hand.
There are many ways your life can come to a dead stop. Getting arrested is one path, but so is getting fired, getting divorced, severe grief, health issues, all of it can get you stuck.
I found myself in a position where most of the paths I wanted to pursue were closed off to me. I knew that I was going to be in the gears of the criminal justice system for a year or two, followed by multiple years in prison. This meant I couldn’t start a new business nor could I develop any sort of serious long-term relationships knowing that I had this chasm ahead of me. No ability to push any major pieces. No ability to develop the board. It was miserable until I stopped wallowing in self-doubt and started finding ways to move forward.
“Make hay when the sun shines, and when it rains sharpen your tools.”
The months that followed in 2021 consisted of a Wet Hot Institutionalized Summer. First, at a rehab clinic surrounded by people who were stuck beyond stuck. There’s levels to this shit. I was stuck in the sense of damn, I can’t accomplish my long-term goals. Most of the people there were so stuck they couldn’t get out of bed. The crazy thing is that a lot of them didn’t do anything wrong. Life happened to them, their kid got hit by a bus, they were victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse, childhood trauma, or weighed down by soul-crushing levels of pain and grief. Whatever it was, they were physically and mentally too fucked up to even think about moving forward. I stopped feeling sorry for myself within 24 hours after deciding that I wouldn’t trade places with anyone there. In fairness, I’m sure someone there said the same thing about me. But there was a staff member there who was a hero, the same guy I wrote about extensively in Blind Spots, and he said the same thing every single day: keep showing up to life. Nothing else you can do. No matter how rough shit is, you simply have to keep showing up to life. You have to find a way to move forward.
I was spending a lot of time there writing and this was when the whole moving forward thing really took shape in my depraved and polluted mind. I started thinking back to all the years of my past and measuring them. In hindsight, many years that I thought were productive actually weren’t. I worked my ass off, I learned about some new businesses and industries, I added a year of work experience to my resume, I inhaled Adderall, exhaled Excel and got paid good money for doing it. I saved up some dough, spent most of it, chased women, drank, did drugs and traveled. But what did I really gain? What did I really accomplish? Was I moving forward, or was I just another conveyor belt automaton?
It was at this point that I first wrote there are four stages to the game of life: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Body, mind, soul and God. You can always find a way to keep pushing forward on all of those. The other conclusion I drew was on discipline. You can always, always, always find a way to improve your self-discipline. For me it started with getting booze and drugs out of my life, then on fixing my habits, the basics like sleep, diet and exercise. Getting those snapped and locked into place took the better part of a year because it required rebuilding my entire life from scratch. The end result was worth it: sleeping eight every night, up before 5:00, working out seven days a week, a clean diet, lots of sun, this stuff is the quickest way to improve the quality of your life. I don’t know who the first wise man was to say that discipline is freedom, but they are some of the truest words ever written. And so, taking this all into account… like… did I move forward? I don’t know. My life sucked, but I was going to bed every night thinking you know what, that was a pretty good day; maybe Freud was right about that whole ‘years of struggle being the most beautiful’ thing. Overall, I was feeling pretty good about my progress.
This was when I was whisked off to the Feds.
I thought I had been stuck before, but now I was really stuck. Over those first few months, I came to know what true powerlessness feels like. All my messy situations involving friends or family, relationships where I’d been their rock, their shoulder to lean on, where my relative stability was what was helping someone else keep showing up to life, everything slammed shut like a steel gate. There just isn’t much you can do to help when you’re locked behind concrete walls and barbed wire. Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, this was the first time in my life that I came to know God. It is funny because there is nothing more cliche than a guy getting tossed in jail and praying to the Lord for redemption for his sins, but this ran far, far deeper than that. It was the full recognition of how futile it is for one man to think he can influence the universal course of events. This world, brother, this world we inhabit truly is the kingdom of chance and error, and until you somehow internalize this for yourself you do not understand true humility. I had sort of come to appreciate this notion after how a pandemic had drastically altered the course of my life in a mind-boggling number of ways — man plans and God laughs — but I think I had still kept my locus of control pushed out farther than it needed to be. Now, I would hear about someone I cared for at home going through hard times or health problems, and all I could do was put my full faith in God. Area man is magnetically realigned away from free will and towards determinism.
I got back to thinking about moving forward. I knew I was going to be stuck here for years and kept telling myself: I refuse to have this be a waste of time. That was the first thing I’d tell myself every morning.
You’ve got a fresh 24, homeboy, and you are required to use these 24 in a more productive way than you would be using them in the free world.
Make hay when the sun shines, and when it rains, sharpen your tools. Your life right now is rain — what are you going to do about it?
Once again, cliche city, but I had a calendar on the wall where I had been crossing off X’s at the end of each day. Now, I woke up and crossed off the X the moment I got out of bed. You’re only getting these 24 once. Time to make the most of them.
I was still focused on the four stages of life, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, making daily progress in each of those but now trying to take it to new levels. I think most days were two hours of exercise, two hours of teaching classes, three hours writing books and six hours of reading. Once again, my life clearly sucked, but I was going to bed every night thinking that was actually a productive damn day. It is crazy in retrospect, but the whole I’m dedicated to not having this be a waste of time, like, when you go into every single day demonic about that attitude, you end up getting way more done than when you’re wandering through life on autopilot.
My discipline and habits were about as strict as I could get them, so I started thinking more other forms of impulse control and moved onto discipline of speech. Thinking before you speak, thinking about the impact your words are going to have on others, even thinking about the way your words could be perceived. All of this takes time and requires thought, and when you’re thinking, you’re not speaking. I spent time thinking about how to be a more disciplined listener, on becoming the rare person who actually hears what the other person is saying and isn’t just waiting for them to finish speaking so they can reply. I practiced counting to three before responding. I would set goals on random days to make it through that day speaking as few words as possible, just walking around and substituting words with nods and hand signals wherever possible. I never made it to zero words, but I got close. Also, I’m a psychopath if that wasn’t obvious by now. But there’s a reason why the sages of every single world religion say that silence is good for the soul: because it is. God, or nature, or whoever you believe designed us, my Judeo-Christian friends, they locked our tongue away behind not one but two cages: the teeth and the lips. When you think about your speech that way, about the effort it requires to remove your tongue from that cage and about how frequently you use it for slander and gossip and hurtful language, and I mean really think about it, and you fully hold yourself accountable for all the evil speech you’ve made in the past — you’re going to shut the hell up. For real. I’ve met thousands of men who talk too damn much and I have yet to meet a man who talks too little. Tells you something.
As an added bonus, when you speak less, it puts more gravity on the words that do manage to escape your mouth.
The final frontier is discipline of thought. You can show discipline in your actions and discipline in your speech, which the world will notice, but discipline of thought belongs to you and you only, I suppose along with whatever higher power you choose to believe in. I was spending a lot of time in this realm, lost in my own thoughts, when the announcement came over the intercom that it was time for me to go home.
And, so, that’s where I’m at today. No longer stuck. All lanes of my life are once again open. Blessed, grateful, humble, highly favored, flourishing, moisturized, in my lane, etc etc.
What is moving forward?
I’m still trying to figure it out, but in the meantime, the best I can do is to hope that this helps the next man come closer to answering yet another one of those Q’s with no A’s.
Keep showing up to life,
GB
